


Getting laid ain't what it used to be

by pushdragon



Category: Inception
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-17
Updated: 2011-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 20:16:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames has some confusion about the difference between lying and laying. Arthur educates him in an unconventional manner. Who knew that grammar could be so filthy?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting laid ain't what it used to be

**Author's Note:**

> I owe Pingrid and Blamebrampton (who had to beta large portions with her eyes closed) big time for making this more polished.

It had only been a fraction of a particle of a smidgeon of a second, but Arthur of course hadn't missed it.

"You hesitated."

"It was just a dry run, precious," Eames replied tightly. "There's no need to make a song and dance about it."

Eames plucked the line from his arm, but before he could swing his legs off the chair, Arthur was standing in front of him, turning himself into an implacable obstacle.

"When you talked about the photograph, you said, and I quote: 'It was you and a young man, both ... both on the bed' – I could see you panicking, Eames, and that gap was long enough for a chorus of "If I only had a brain" – you could have thrown in a couple of verses as well."

"If you're proposing to put in show tunes, I'll want my name up in lights."

When he tried to stand, Arthur pushed him back with a casual hand on his chest.

Ariadne said, "I'll just post that urgent letter, shall I?" She wound her line up neatly and left it on her chair. "Half an hour if I stop by Pretzelmaker. And Eames? He does have a point."

When the door had closed, Arthur crossed his arms severely.

"How were you going to finish that sentence? 'You and the young man were ...'?"

His maths were marginally better than his grammar; he knew he had a fifty-fifty chance. He shrugged. "Laying on the bed."

It was supremely unfair. That time Cobb had led them under false pretences into a three-level dream trap which could have finished off every single one of them, the look he had got from Arthur had not been quite as sour as the one Eames was looking at now.

 _"Lying_ then," Eames muttered. "What's the difference?"

"The difference? You're supposed to be forging a Yale professor who was widely regarded as one of the finest legal draftsmen in the country. Your spelling and math we can cover, but you cannot afford to slip up on grammar."

"It's a dream. If Ari has done the job on the library, no-one's going to give a shit whether I can tell the difference between a concrete noun and Charles Dickens' arsehole."

"Don't bait me. And don’t blame Ariadne. The mark is a Supreme Court nominee – I guarantee there is not a single person in her close circle who doesn't know the difference between a gerund and a present participle."

"Their dinner parties must be almost as much of a riot as yours, darling."

Arthur stepped back to let him get up, so he stretched out in the chair and declined to do so.

"Make a call, Eames, and make the right call. If you can't do this, we'll find someone who can play the part."

Eames snorted. "Be my guest. Where in this criminal underworld we circulate in do you imagine you'll find someone with even a completed undergraduate qualification that hasn't been doctored – let alone someone who wasted four years of their youth reading literature."

He noted Arthur's expression carefully. _"You._ I should have known. All right. Cancel your plans for this evening. If you think I need to brush up, you're going to bloody well teach me yourself."

Arthur gave him a look like he'd just been asked to perform an ungloved colonoscopy in the aftermath of a seven-course curry banquet.

**

The chair in the corner of the room was battered wood. It looked like it had been sat on by unhappy bottoms and shoved around neglectfully. Eames chose it out of empathy.

"I think we might need to enhance your focus this evening," Arthur said casually as Eames sat down.

That gave him a shiver that was not entirely anxiety. "Is that your professional opinion as an English major?"

Arthur was rifling around the dusty shelves on the wall. "That's my professional opinion–" When he turned back, his hands were full of cream coloured telephone extension cord. "– as someone who knows how you need to be dealt with."

His tone spoke right to Eames's muscle memory. No, that was not anxiety at all. He got on one knee by Eames's chair.

"Hands please. Have you always been a difficult student?"

The cord made three firm loops around Eames's left wrist.

"No," he said, a bit distracted by the firm discipline of Arthur's hands at work. "I started out as an all-round ungovernable lout and worked my way up from there."

Arthur slipped the cord under the bar that ran between the front legs of the chair, pulled it taut until Eames was bending forward in his seat, then wrapped it a few times around the bar. Once he had Eames's left hand trapped between his calves, he reached for the right and secured it in the same way, maintaining the half-teasing conversation as his fingers tied the knots.

"You're not from old money after all, then?"

Eames snorted. "What makes you think _they_ can spell?"

"You've maintained a very pointed silence on some aspects of your background that was clearly meant to suggest you were educated alongside England's finest," Arthur said as he looped the cord around both wrists together and edged the tip of his finger under it to make sure it wasn't too tight – and there weren't many people, Eames thought, who could be trusted to tie plastic cord without cutting off circulation, and to remember not to put too much strain on it later.

"Dyslexia is no respecter of pedigree. If you'd picked up some science instead of pissing about with pompous dead guys, you might have learned that."

Pushing back on Eames's shoulders, Arthur seemed satisfied with his limited range of movement.

"I assumed the foundation of the English education system was paying the best teachers to beat it into you, if necessary."

When he cautiously tested Arthur's knots himself, they held firmly.

"You're really enjoying that thought, aren't you?"

Only Arthur could manage a smile that looked darkly menacing and just a little bit sweet all at once.

"Not especially. What a waste. They wouldn't have gotten any pleasure out of it at all."

**

"The verb to lie. Present tense, lie," Eames was reciting in a voice that distinctly lacked passion. "Present participle: lying. Past tense: lay. Past participle: lain. The verb 'to lie' is used when there is no object, or an indirect object, which means an object introduced by a preposition such as 'in', 'on', or 'at'."

Arthur hadn't done anything pleasant or unpleasant to him yet. He was just walking his fingers casually over Eames's shoulder and across his back, lapping up the privilege of touching while Eames was bound.

"The verb to lay. Present tense: lay. Present participle: laying. Past tense: laid. Past participle: laid. The verb 'to lay' requires a direct object, which means an object that is not introduced by a preposition. It is typically–"

Arthur took a step back. "All right. We already knew you have perfect recall when you can be bothered applying it. What matters is whether you can do it under pressure. Let's see if you can ad lib."

"Oh darling," said Eames, low and sultry, "I thought you'd never ask."

In about half the length of the uncertain pause that had begun this whole ordeal, Eames knew the whole story he wanted to tell.

"Arthur stripped off and _lay_ down on the rooftop. After a hard day's work, he liked to _lay_ naked–"

"He liked to _lie_ naked, Mr Eames. It's the same verb, but your first sentence was past tense, hence 'lay', whereas your second uses the infinitive form 'to lie'. And please tell me the rooftop is private."

"After a hard day's work, he liked to _lie_ naked with the warm concrete under his back, letting the stress of dealing with idiots and illiterates drain away from him." That got him a grudging smile. "Sometimes, when he'd been _lying_ there for an hour or more, when he'd _lain_ there until the sun was gone and his bare legs were starting to get shivery with cold, it still wasn't enough to relax him properly."

"All correct conjugations of the verb 'to lie'. Are we going to see the other one soon?"

"Yes, yes. Don't rush me. Arthur picked up the tube of lubricant which he had _laid_ out–"

"Oh, bravo. 'Lay' not 'lie' because the action relates to a direct object, and elegant use of the past participle."

Arthur, of course, did not say anything about the sudden appearance of lubricant in the story.

"He picked up the tube of lubricant which he had _laid_ out that morning, because it was a Friday and this was his Friday afternoon ritual. But little did Arthur know that as he had been _laying_ his shirt and tie and trousers on the top of the air-conditioning duct and _lying_ down on the concrete, someone had been watching it all."

He gave a coy little glance at Arthur, who nodded, presumably at his grammatical accuracy rather than the prospect of voyeurism.

"With a deep breath, he squeezed lube into his palm and _laid_ the tube down. He sighed as he wrapped his hand around his half-hard cock. What a way to finish the week – skipping off work, sunlight, warm concrete, and an illicit rooftop wank. He closed his eyes. All of a sudden, a figure came out from behind the maintenance room. A handsome, well-built figure that brought to mind the best qualities of Bond along with the chest definition of a professional prize fighter. A figure that had _laid_ in wait–"

"Sorry to burst your bubble, Eames. There's no direct object in that sentence. You need 'lie', and therefore _lain._ The figure had _lain_ in wait. And your build is more early Roman legionnaire than anything else."

If he hadn't been about to get to the good bit, Eames might have given Arthur more than just a curious look.

"Arthur had no time for grammar – he needed to get off, he couldn't wait. He went roughly on himself, rough like his hand belonged to someone else. He was wanking himself brutally when a boot was _laid_ in the middle of his chest. 'Don't stop,' said the stranger as Arthur's eyes flew open. 'I'm going to watch.' And he knelt down by Arthur's side and _laid_ his hand on his knee, easing it apart from the other and stroking the inside of his thigh. He could see everything, Arthur thought, as he wrapped his hand back around his stiff prick and squeezed it tight."

Though Arthur had gone silent, his fingers were digging into the back of Eames's shoulder.

"The well-built stranger unzipped his jeans and massaged his own prick, then he put his slippery hand over the top of Arthur's and helped him build up to a hectic rhythm–"

"Hang on, Eames. You're not using the words."

"Fuck that. Arthur had tried to sit up, and the stranger just pushed him back into the concrete with a powerful arm. Then he grabbed–"

"–just then, knocked one of the man's arms from under him and rolled into the other. Before Eames knew it, Arthur had him _lying_ face-down, where he was damn well going to stay."

If Eames's hands had been free, he would have put them in his lap about now, a light weight to rub up his thickening arousal into the real thing.

Instead he continued, "All right. The stranger wasn't fussy about how they did this. He knew he was onto a good thing. His backside had come free of his jeans during the struggle and a moment later Arthur was fingering him, just the tip, working it like the god-awful tease he was. The stranger shifted his knees apart and let it happen. 'I'm going to fuck you,' Arthur promised as he lathered in lube to make up for the patience that neither of them were going to have. 'I'm going to fuck you right now'."

 _"–bareback–"_

Eames screwed his eyes shut, as if he could imprint the sound of Arthur sighing that unlikely word on his memory for all time.

"Yeah," Eames resumed as soon as he was capable of it. "About a heartbeat later, Arthur was buried to the hilt in the stranger's firmly muscled arse. It was the tightest fuck of his life, resistance all the way like he'd never felt it before, but the stranger was shoving up into him because he wanted more, wanted it harder."

"And Christ he was going to get it. Arthur bent right down over him and planted his hands on the ground by Eames's shoulders, and he slammed hard into him. And fuck he was naked on a rooftop with a complete fucking stranger, he was–"

Eames could _hear_ the sound of Arthur's fingernails wrenching in his shirt.

"All of the stranger's muscles clenched around him at once and he had no choice, he was coming, coming like he'd never done it before, buried to the hilt and emptying himself out as deep as he could get."

After a moment, Arthur resumed a bit vacantly, "He reached around to–"

"No. The stranger shoved his hand away. Not what he wanted. Arthur's dick had come free of him now, and he could feel the come starting to slip down the well abused skin inside him." He left a testing pause, but Arthur made no protest. "The man said 'Go on' and Arthur understood what he needed to do. He bent down and tentatively licked at the hot, slippery flesh around the stranger's hole." Arthur still wasn't saying no. Eames wasn't even sure he was still breathing. "It was incredible. The muscle that had felt so firm around his cock gave way to his tongue like butter as he pushed inside. 'Suck me,' the stranger said, 'suck it all out'. And Arthur did, he put his mouth down there and sucked, probing with his tongue as gently as he'd ever kissed a girl's mouth. When he was done, when there was nothing left to lick or suck, the stranger's hole lay open for him, loose and exhausted and content."

For a moment, the roar of blood in his ears went quiet, and Eames could hear their breath heaving in rhythm. The air was so humid he could virtually taste the arousal in it.

Arthur leaned in very close, murmuring against his ear.

"If you get on top of this, Mr Eames. If you pull off this forgery. If you have the longest, soapiest and most thorough shower of your life, I will do that for you."

Eames had to grit his teeth to stop himself groaning at that, because behind the confidence that Arthur threw on like a flak jacket, there was a hesitance that said it was something he hadn't done for another man before, or hadn't done it much, and the thought of spick-and-span Arthur turning his prim mouth to such a filthy purpose made him hot from head to toe.

"Right now," Eames said, giving in to the brutal pulse between his legs. "I'd settle for your hand."

Arthur, without so much as unfastening the cuffs of his white-on-black pin-stripe shirt, got down on one knee to reach into the gap between Eames's stomach and thighs, found the swell of his cock and stroked it firmly with his thumb.

"A little like this?"

"Not," said Eames between his teeth, "precisely like that."

"Oh."

The sadistic fucker proceeded to pluck open Eames's belt and work the front of his trousers apart, stirring up what had been optimistic interest into a straining hard-on that throbbed when his knuckles ran over it through the thin cloth of his underpants. Arthur stroked until the fabric grew damp, and Eames's forehead, neck and chest along with it.

He put his lips to the damp hair at Eames's temple. "Is that more like it?"

"I am going to pick my teeth with your bones when we are done here. Do it properly, you miserable cunt, or let me go."

Arthur stopped entirely.

"What happened to your will to learn?" Even when he was making life a living hell, Arthur's smile was disarmingly sweet.

"Come on, Mr Eames. You want it, you can work for it. The verb 'to lie'. Present, past and both participles, please. You'll really like what happens if you put it in a sentence."

He was stroking idly around the crown of Eames's cock, creating what felt like a straining net of teased-up tendons that made his whole belly ache. Torn between mounting pleasure and discomfort at the swell of his balls caught between the acute angle of his torso and thighs and the unforgiving seat of the chair beneath, he could only say, "You shit, Arthur, you total–"

Arthur kissed the side of his mouth, lightly. "I want you to nail this. I really do."

With what little breath he could get into his lungs in this strained posture, Eames sighed and closed his eyes. "To lie. Infinitive form. Present tense, I lie, you lie, he lies, it lies ... meaning to be ... to be situated, to recline, someth– oh mother of god, Arthur."

Finally finding naked skin, he was dragging his fingers up the sides of Eames's shaft, the head nudging firmly into his palm. "Perfect," Eames murmured.

"Present participle."

"Oh god – lying. Lying. You'll be lying in a pool of your own blood if you stop."

"Now, now. Past tense."

He was squeezing decisively with each stroke, milking Eames until his skin felt stretched like a drum, picking up the slightest quiver of Arthur's attentions.

"Past– fuck, Arthur. Lay. I lay, you lay, they lay, we all fucking lay. All last night you lay in your bed and tossed off to the thought of wrecking me like this."

He made a strangled sound when Arthur nuzzled against the side of his neck and bit his earlobe hard, whispering, "You're good, Eames, really good. Past participle."

"Lain," he cried, somewhere between entreaty and hallelujah. "Lain. Your choices have lain on the border-line between kinky and truly fucking deranged all night, darling."

"Beautiful," Arthur positively crooned. "Now let's give your voicebox a rest, shall we?"

Then he withdrew his hand, rose, unfastened his trousers, and steadied Eames's chin to feed his cock into his mouth.

Eames could only moan as the head of it bulged out his cheek. He rearranged his teeth and lips and sucked it in deeper.

"Yes, god, Eames, that's just right."

Pinned like that, hands fastened between his calves with plastic cord that would bite if he pulled on it, there was no way to do anything other than suck in every one of Arthur's slow thrusts, as deep as he cared to go. His cock slid salty and velvety soft over Eames's lips, the perfect depth to make him work his throat, the perfect width to go in easy.

And through it all, Arthur was murmuring–

"The verb 'to lay'. Transitive verb, requires a direct object. In the present tense, you have to lay – Christ, Eames, I see why you never had time to go to English class, and may I say that's a career choice I wholly endorse at the moment – you have to lay _something._ Example. Present tense, when I _lay my hand_ on your head I want you to stop sucking and just hold me in your mouth."

There was sweat trickling down the back of Eames's neck, down his sides under his clothes, and Arthur's shirt had flashes of white light in its weave as he held himself still and let the pulse of Arthur's dick beat into his mouth.

"Present participle," Arthur continued, nice and slow. "Laying. The word laying always, always, without fail, requires a direct object in any context. Are you listening to me Eames? This is the most important bit. You can never use the word _laying_ unless you've identified your direct object. You can't be _laying_ on the bed, Eames, because 'on the bed' is an indirect object, starts with a preposition. The implied direct object would be an egg and–"

In a meticulous piece of timing, Eames swiped his tongue rather suddenly and made Arthur punctuate his lesson with a noise quite like a hen.

"Yes, keep doing that," Arthur panted, words starting to tumble and slur as his thrusts began to bruise Eames's lips against his teeth. "Past tense ... Past – oh fuck, Eames, fuck, you sound like you want it more than I do–"

And Eames murmured hungrily around his mouthful because he did want it, wanted the bristle of Arthur's pubic hair that was just out of reach of his nose, wanted that shifting grip of Arthur's fingers clutching his scalp, wanted the thump of cockhead against the back of his throat. He could taste all through his mouth how close Arthur was, could see it in the way his diligently pressed trousers had pooled forgotten around his ankles.

"Eames–"

Perfect.

 _"Eames–"_

Arthur with all his fancy conjugated verbs erased from his mind so that the only word he had left was Eames's name, and even that was breaking out of him like a cry, as if he couldn't remember what it meant. Eames forced the muscles in his jaw into one last squeeze and swiped upwards with his tongue. At that, Arthur just shuddered, deep and electric, and all the lovely flesh in Eames's mouth pulsed and surrendered to his pull.

Half-done, Arthur somehow found the willpower to draw back, taking his dick in hand as it splattered out its pleasure over Eames's open mouth and across his face, warm and clinging, and _that_ – even before the surprise registered, Eames's chin had been straining up towards it, starving for it, thirsty for every debauched drop Arthur had to give.

Still holding his swollen cock in hand, Arthur looked dangerously alive and intensely focussed. Probably he had no idea how far from composed he was as he panted like a hunted man and stared at Eames.

"Your mouth is obscene, Mr Eames." His voice had gone hushed and raw. He brushed Eames's bottom lip gently with the back of his knuckle and caught the warm spunk splashed across his mouth and cheek and chin. They both watched it string out and stretch, glistening, as Arthur drew his hand back. Eames's balls throbbed against the seat, and throbbed harder when Arthur rubbed the slick of transferred come between his thumb and fingertip as if dwelling on the memory of what it was and how it had got from the depths of his body onto Eames's skin. "Nothing I can think of is too disgusting to do to your filthy fucking mouth."

He dragged his thumb across Eames's lips this time, smearing come back and forth across them, around them, dipping inside to get it onto the tip of his tongue too. Eames could feel the crawl over his skin as a trickle of it ran down his neck, mixing with his sweat. Arthur just unbuttoned Eames's collar and pulled it back to watch the slick of it sliding down into the hair of his chest.

Arthur leaned down and licked an excruciatingly slow stripe from the wet hollow of his cheek right up to the outer corner of his eye, and Eames shuddered like a man under torture.

"You're killing me," he said, sounding hoarse, sounding drunk. The ache between his legs was pounding harder with each heartbeat.

If Arthur made him wait while he fixed up his trousers, straightened his tie and tucked his shirt back in, it was worth it for the sight of him kneeling in his executive business attire to run his palm over the slick on Eames's chin. He spat into his palm after that, gaze never faltering, and reached in to get his hand around Eames's cock and start to work him.

"That's it," he managed to choke out on the edge of a groan. When he sucked in his stomach muscles to make all the room he could, Arthur used it to wank him properly, all the way from root to leaking tip, in a purposeful, urgent rhythm that brought him instantly right to the brink.

And then, goddamn slutty angel of mercy that he was, Arthur was picking at Eames's bindings with his free hand and saying, "Give it up for me. Give it all up–" and just on the point where the pressure in his balls and the lack of proper air were going to kill him, one of Eames's hands came free to let him snatch the side of Arthur's face and bite into his mouth so that their jaws vibrated together with the sound he made when the unexpected seismic clench of pleasure drove right through him and wrung him out for good.

It must have been a little while later Arthur gently unhooked Eames's fingers from their entanglement in his hair. Eames watched a few torn strands fall away, clinging to the ends of his fingers then floating off. He hadn't had the slightest idea he'd been so rough.

"There's something wrong with you," he said unsteadily. "You get off on this. Just like in Geneva when you wouldn't stop until I'd learned every single UN Convention since 1945."

Arthur brushed off his knees as he got up. "I'll bet your pulse still rises every time someone mentions the Convention on the Rights of Refugees."

"And let's not even start on how brutal you were on the Mariinsky job when I couldn't remember what country Riga was in."

"Mr Eames–"

"My nipples were as stiff as sword points for a fucking week!"

"Mr Eames, you always knew what country Riga was in. You knew that I knew that. You've been arrested there. Twice."

All right. Eames couldn't resist the smirk that was settling on his mouth. "Never."

"Do you know what you're doing, Mr Eames?"

His voice had that lazy caress that made Eames consider whether there might be a few more tenses he could fuck up. He hooked his finger through one of Arthur's belt loops and started to pull gently. "What's that, love?"

"You're lying."

Eames leaned forward and bit the bottom of Arthur's pectoral through the shirt.

"Not yet, darling. Still a bit too vertical for my liking. Why don't we work on that?"

**

The mark, as it happened, bought his forgery completely.

**

 

The end


End file.
